


Tony Stark Vs The Doctor

by pippen2112



Series: Dammit Barton Series [7]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Disaster and Hilarity, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-14
Updated: 2013-09-14
Packaged: 2017-12-26 12:37:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/966008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pippen2112/pseuds/pippen2112
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark is five years old the first time he meets the Doctor.  It all goes downhill from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tony Stark Vs The Doctor

Tony is five years old the first time he meets the Doctor.  He’s futzing around with some old circuit boards his dad gave him to play with, turning screws and trimming wires without a thought.  He likes working with his hands, likes playing with blocks, likes building.  He likes the feeling he gets when he makes something new. 

 

Today, he twirls a wire around his finger three times before stripping away the plastic coating and separating out the filaments.  He affixes them to the board and marvels when there’s a small hiss as the circuitry hums to life.  He sets down the board, and before his eyes, the device shifts into a box of old computer parts.  He tilts his head at it, and prods the box with his finger.  It shifts back to a circuit board. 

 

Tony picks up the board and carries it into his bedroom.  He sets it on his desk, and it shifts into a lamp.  He puts it in his toy chest, and it becomes a small wheeled robot toy.  He places it on his nightstand, and it becomes a music box that plays a quiet lullaby.  Tony smiles and lets the music play until he’s drifted to sleep.

 

Some hours later, he wakes to a sharp crackle and sees a flash of white light from behind his eyelids.  He bolts upright in bed.  Standing across his bedroom is a tall, thin man.  He seems fairly ordinary, wearing suspenders and a bowtie, but he holds a mop like a spear and wears a weird, almost-cone-like red hat. 

 

The man’s eyes dart from Tony to the now-music box on his night stand.  He sighs, “Now you’re just showing off.”  He swings the mop quickly and smashes the board.  Tony’s eyes widen and he starts to protest.

 

“Why’d you break it?  It was cool.”

 

“No, it was not cool,” the man replies.  “Bowties are cool,” he says as he fiddles with his bowtie.  “Fezes are cool,” he then straightens the hat.  “Mops are…” he starts to flourish the mop, but he stops abruptly.  “Well, no, mops are not cool, but they are useful.”

 

“Who are you?”  Tony asks.

 

The man smiles.  “Oh, yes.  We haven’t met yet.  I’m the Doctor.”

 

“You talk a lot.”

 

The man’s face goes slack in surprise before he grins.  “Oh, that will be a fantastic punch line in, oh, forty years.  I cannot wait.”

 

He begins to fiddle with some weird wrist band on his arm before he looks at Tony, once more, smiles, and winks.  “See you then.”

 

And just as quickly as he appeared, the Doctor disappears into a burst of white light and an electric crackle.

 

#

 

The second time he meets the Doctor, Tony doesn’t actually see him.  Since their first encounter, Tony has been told and re-told by every adult he’s come in contact with that the Doctor was just a dream of a tired young boy.  After ten years of that, Tony’s managed to convince himself that the Doctor, the morphing circuit board, and the electric whizz were all just part of his imagination.

 

That makes the sudden disappearance of his latest project all the more confusing.  He’d been tinkering with artificial intelligence for the past few years in his free time.  It suited him, tinkering away at the seemingly endless coded possibilities and honing it down for the exact reaction sequence he wanted.  So far, the project had been fairly successful, and he was almost ready to unveil the Automated Canine Unit, Model 8, to the world.

 

Unfortunately, when he arrives in the workshop that morning, what he finds is not the prototype or the blueprints and failed models of the last seven prototypes.  Instead, what he finds are a note reading “Don’t take my stuff” scribbled on a waxy white paper bag and a handful of gummy candies.   Tony doesn’t remotely understand what he’s looking at, but he has a sneaky suspicion that everyone else just might be wrong about the Doctor.

 

#

 

The Mark II is almost ready.  It gleams in the garage lights and whirrs quietly whenever he moves.  JARVIS roars over the HUD, “Sir, there are still terabytes of calculations required before an actual flight is—“

 

“Jarvis,” Tony retorts sharply, “sometimes you gotta run before you can walk.”

 

He prepares for takeoff when a mechanical whoosh sounds behind him.  He turns slowly and sees a large blue box the size of a port-a-potty appearing just behind his work bench.  The vehicle materializes, and Tony quickly reads the word “police box” across the top of the box.  Beneath the helmet, his brow furrows.  “What the hell?”

 

The vehicle’s door swings open, and a bright light is emitted from within.  Suddenly, a blonde man storms out wearing a pale yellow sport coat with a piece of celery pinned to the lapel.  His face is faintly red and his brow is twisted in anger.

 

“Stark!” he bellows.  “Do you ever not stop tampering with the flow of time and space?  I told you last time to stop being so clever or there would be consequences.”

 

“How did you get in here, Mr…?” Tony replies, stumbling backward in the Mark II suit.

 

“It’s Doctor, Stark.  Just the Doctor.”

 

“Doctor who?”  Tony asks as the man pulls a silver wand from his jacket and flourishes it.  It can’t be the same man who visited his bedroom when he was a boy; that man was…different.

 

“That doesn’t matter.  What matters, Stark, is that you can’t keep the suit.”

 

Tony raises the repulsors in retaliation.  “Why not?”

 

Abruptly, the whooshing sound starts again and another blue box materializes only this one looks older, dirtier, and more battered.   A man with wild hair and a long trench coat strides out and stands between Tony and the Doctor.  “No, no.  It’s all a misunderstanding,” he looks the Doctor in the eye.  “Mr. Stark isn’t doing anything wrong.”

 

“Really?” Tony quips as he meanders over toward the vessels.  “That’s a first.”

 

He raises his hands to touch the almost-wooden exterior when the coated man holds out his own silver device and clicks the blue light at him;  instantly, Tony’s hand freezes.  “Don’t even think about it, Stark.”

 

“Too late,” Tony retorts as he flexes and strains to move his arm.

 

The Doctor looks at the coated man’s device and back at the man’s stern expression before nodding slowly.  “If you’re sure…”

 

“Completely.  Well, ninety-four percent, but I’ve got enough evidence to blackmail him into the other six percent.”

 

The Doctor nods as an alarm sounds behind him.  His eyes go wide.  “Sorry, must dash,” he calls as he hurries back to his vessel.  The whooshing sounds once more and the first blue box disappears.

 

The coated man with wild hair turns and strolls back to his box, pulling out the device once more and firing it in Tony’s direction.  Tony falls to the ground, no pistons firing to help him take the Mark II’s weight.  He groans.

 

“What kind of tech is that?”

 

“Don’t think about it, Stark,” the coated man replies as he opens the door.

 

“Too late,” Tony says as he mentally assesses the device and tries to riddle out its mechanisms.  He sees light in his periphery and look through the now-open door.  “Holy shit, it’s bigger on the inside!” 

 

“I mean it,” the man counters.  “Mankind isn’t supposed to develop sonic technology for another century, much less dimensionality transcendence, and you’re just the sort of man to figure it out.”

 

Tony’s eyebrow rises and he tries (and fails) to point at the man’s devide.  “That thing’s sonic?”

 

The man smirks at him and uses his sonic device once more to restore power to the suit.  “Oh yes.”

 

Tony gets to his feet slowly, maintaining eye contact with the man the entire time.  “Who are you?” he asks quietly.

 

“I’m the Doctor,” the man smiles as he closes the door behind him, and the blue box vanishes. 

 

#

 

Tony doesn’t know how, where, or why Thor procured a turkey roughly the size of a baby hippo for the Avengers’ first Thanksgiving, but right now, all he can say is it was truly delicious, no matter how much trouble he had to go through to cook the damn thing.  He’d been looking at schematics, power output, and overall design of the state of the art oven before he decided to screw the whole thing and start from scratch.  What he ended up with was, in fact, a seemingly ordinary convection oven, but the cavity is actually _bigger on the inside!_   He doesn’t know how many laws of physics he must have broken to make the damn think work.

 

Anyway, now that he’s stuffed himself with enough food to feed a small army and fallen out of his chair laughing when Barton wet-willed Loki, he’s heading back into the kitchen, dreading the mess he knows he’ll find there.  His bemoaning of Asgardian mess-making stops instantly when he hears a now-familiar whirring.  Sure enough, the blue police box pops up right in the middle of his kitchen.  The doors swing open and out walks yet another man, this time with a pointy face and a leather jacket.  He takes one look at Tony, turns his head to stare at the oven, and then looks back to Tony.

 

Tony opens his mouth to say, well, something, but the man shakes his head.  “Bigger on the inside?  Really?”

 

Tony musters all his remaining shame as he looks down at his feet.  “In my defense, it was a huge turkey.”

 

The man cocks his head to the side, eyes suddenly less severe.  “Turkey you say.  Any leftovers?”

 

“Yeah,” Tony answers hopefully.

 

The man in the leather jacket grins.  “Fantastic.  We’ll sort this mess out over sandwiches.”

 

When Tony wakes up several hours later after his food coma, there’s a hole in the kitchen wall where the oven used to be.  No one questions this.

 

#

 

Tony meets this incarnation of the Doctor once more a few years later.  He hasn’t told Pepper what he’s been doing in the lab under Avengers’ Tower, hasn’t mentioned his secret project to anybody for that matter because he doesn’t want to have to explain the concept to them.  But he’s so close with this project.  He’s gotten all the hardware in place, miles of cable and enough circuitry to cover a football field twice over.  He’s been working on the code for months now, but he’s almost done.  He only has to start testing now.

 

He’s three seconds shy of plugging the device into the arc reactor when the metallic, grinding whir sounds, the TARDIS appears and the Doctor storms out.  Tony’s already wearing his apology face and spouting out “I’m sorry”s before the Doctor gets within ten feet of him.

 

“Really, Stark!  This is going too far!”

 

“Oh, please, just let me finish it before you take it away,” Tony pleads as the Doctor yanks the cable out of his hands.

 

“No, just no.  A TARDIS can’t be built, Tony, and growing one is outside mankind’s capacity for another several-hundred years.”

 

Tony pouts.  It’s a very unflattering look on him.  The Doctor stands firm.  “Go upstairs while I clean up.  If you behave, I’ll take you somewhere.”

 

Tony briefly considers this.  “Somewhere with dinosaurs?”

 

The Doctor chuckles but still nods.  Tony huffs before turning on heel and going upstairs to wait. 

 

Tony disappears for a day and a half and comes back covered in dust and dirt with his hair standing on end.  If he also gets a bacterial infection caused by microbes that haven’t existed since the Jurassic era, Bruce doesn’t mention it.  The smug smile and child-like glee in Tony’s eyes says enough.

 

#

 

Iron Man hovers over the city, scanning through the rubble and trying to designate between human heat signatures, radioactive robots courtesy of HYDRA, and irradiated debris.  Even from this distance, the HUD is just a mess of white hot noise and he can barely make heads or tails of it.  He really needs to invent better sensors.  He quickly adds it to his list of modifications he’ll make on the next suit.

 

“Need a breather, Stark,” Hawkeye quips over the comm lines.

 

“More like a better set of eyes.  No offense, Jarvis.”

 

“None taken, sir,” the AI responds in his ear. 

 

“We could use more firepower down here,” Cap calls with a grunt and a whoosh that could only be his shield slashing through another robot.  “These things just keep coming.”

 

“Well, if you want a face full of missile, I’ll get right on that.  Unfortunately, my targeting system tell a civilian from a hole in the ground.”

 

The Hulk roars somewhere below him, barreling through lines of robots as it goes.  Surprisingly, the bots seem to quiver at the noise, momentarily faltering before continuing a forward attack.  Tony’s not the only one who notices.

 

“Perhaps they cannot function when confronted with audible interference,” Thor suggests.

 

Tony takes that information and runs.  Interference.  He can do that.  He just needs a little bit of this and a little bit of that.  Shouldn’t be hard to jerry rig some kind of a disrupter.

 

“Come on, Stark,” Natasha calls from the fray below, her accent peeking through as she shouts his name.  “You got some sonic gadget in your bag of tricks.”

 

The word “sonic” makes him freeze midair.  Could that work?  Maybe, maybe not.  He’s still in the testing phases of his prototype, but it’s not like it’s gonna explode in his hand or anything gruesome like that.  But still, he remembers the Doctor constantly warning him about the world not being ready for sonic technology.  Surely, the mad man was exaggerating.  Surely.

 

“I got this,” Tony says as he holds up his hand.  One of the panels on his arm slides away and out pops his sonic probe.  He modeled it on the one he always sees the Doctor flourishing, long and narrow with exposed circuits and wires and a brightly colored light at the tip.  Since it’s just a prototype, he hasn’t painted it to match his suit, but the probe still feels right in his hand.

 

He’s gonna have to time this burst just right to give them the maximum coverage of the area.  One sonic pulse should be enough to knock out this armada of single-minded, barely humanoid robots.  He’s about to dive into the thick of the battle, about to surrender himself to blindness until the pulse goes off, when an all too familiar whoosh sounds next to him and his not-so-favorite blue box appears in the sky, bobbing up and down in the wind.

 

Tony’s gaping at the TARDIS when the Doctor throws open the doors.  His trench coat flies in the wind, his hair sticks up in the front, and the buttons of his blue suit are mis-buttoned.  Without a word, the Doctor reaches out and swipes the device out of Tony’s hand.

 

“My probe!” Tony yells.

 

The Doctor glares.  “No, no, no.  Not only did you experiment with sonic technology when I explicitly told you not to, but you made a _probe!_ ”

 

“I’m kinda in the middle of something here, Doctor.  A stop-the-evil-robots kind of something.  Do you mind?”

 

With a heavy sigh, the Doctor mutters something about children never learning, before he twirls his sonic out of his jacket and aims it at the robots below.  For about three seconds, the sonic glows blue and whizzes, and then, the robots shudder as their bolts unscrew and their forms crumble.  Satisfied, the Doctor gives a nod before the TARDIS doors slam closed and the big blue police box vanishes.

 

#

 

When Tony tells Clint about the Doctor later that night down in his workshop.  The archer methodically cleans his bow and loads shafts into his quiver as Tony runs his mouth and tinkers with the hydraulic system of the Iron Man suit.  Every once in a while, Clint will raise an eyebrow or snicker skeptically, but Tony just sticks his tongue out and keeps talking.

 

“Seriously, I can believe the port-a-potty floating several hundred feet over the streets of Manhattan, and the whole time travel idea I can get behind, but you’re saying this guy regenerates?”

 

“That’s the only explanation for why he always looks different every time I see him,” Tony protested.  “When I was a kid, I thought I just had a ridiculously vivid imagination, ‘cause, you know, I’m a genius, but he kept showing up too often to be anything but real.”

 

Clint shakes his head and smiles.  “You sound like your losing it.”

 

“Then why are you grinning?” Tony asks as he recalibrates the levels of hydraulic fluid. 

 

“ ‘Cause proving you hallucinate would count as winning against Natasha.”

 

Tony almost drops the hand-held scanner he’s been using.  “Natasha thinks I’m _not crazy_?  _You_ think I’m crazy?”

 

“No, she bet you’re manic-depressive.  I bet you’re schizophrenic.  We’ve been compiling evidence for years.  Mostly inconclusive, but the jury’s still out.”

 

“Who’s the jury?”  Tony says as he threw a handful of dried fruit into his mouth.

 

Clint smirks.  “Coulson.”

 

Tony chokes with the force of his laugh, sputtering out a dried blueberry or two.  It is far from his most graceful moment.

 

Just then, the workshop air crackles with a spark of electricity.  There’s a deafening crack, a flash of bright light, and a lanky man wearing a fez and wielding a mop stumbles frazzledly across the room.  For a moment, he spins around, scanning the occupants, noting the various rigs and prototypes before he scoffs and swings the mop into a nearby pile of junk parts.  “Stark!  How many times do I have to tell you? No. More. Illicit. Tech.”  He punctuates each word with a slam of the mop.  “After all this time, I’d think you’d come to understand the meaning of the phrase “detrimental to the course of human history” just the tiniest bit.  But no, it would seem the great Tony Stark never. Ever. Learns.”

 

Suddenly, an arrow flies right past Tony’s nose and imbeds itself in the narrow space of the mop’s handle.  Tony flinches reflexively when he sees exactly how close the arrow landed to the Doctor’s thumb (though the Doctor looks less perturbed and more amazed at the feat).  Tony circles around.  “Dammit Barton! You do not shoot at the Doctor!”

 

Clint lowers his bow very slowly.  “That’s the Doctor?”

 

“Hello,” the aforementioned Time Lord says with a small wave. “I’m the Doctor.”

 

Clint’s brow furrows and he looks between Tony and the Doctor.  “He talks a lot.”

 

Tony scoffed.  “He doesn’t talk all that much.”

 

“Compared to you, maybe.”

 

“ _I_ don’t talk that much.”

 

“Yeah, you do.”

 

Before Tony can retort a second time, the Doctor says, “Right.  Well, Stark, I hope this doesn’t happen again.”  As he speaks, the Doctor gestures at the pile of now-shattered machinery.

 

Tony shrugs.  “That was just spare parts.”

 

The Doctor looks from the pile of misplaced components to Stark with a curious expression.  “You mean you weren’t trying to build a quantum space accelerator?”

 

Tony’s jaw drops.  “A what?”

 

The Doctor twirls his mop, tucks it under his arm, and quickly punches some buttons on the bulky bracer around his wrist.  “Cherrio, boys.  I’ve got a mad ginger and her plastic, miraculously-un-disappeared-from-the-universe boyfriend to save.”

 

And with that, there’s a crackle of electric energy, and then the Doctor’s gone.  Tony and Clint stare in silence for a minute before Clint pipes up, “You have the weirdest fuckin’ friends.”

 

Tony can’t agree more.

 

 FIN.


End file.
